I read the book “The 12 Week Year for Writers: A Comprehensive Guide to Getting Your Writing Done” (Affiliate Link). I’m going to join in with Tamara Woods, as she’s a youtuber whose organizing a weekly writers stream, for writing sprints and for accountability on Mondays at 10pm. She also usually has a Thursday afternoon stream that I pop into if I’m awake. This is Tamara’s video explaining the concept.
As for my review of the book. It’s a typical dry craft book. It has a great many similarities to the HB90 system that Sara Cannon teachers, but the 12 week year is perhaps less flexible, and uses different terminology. It uses tactics instead of tasks or milestones. Other than that it’s very similar, identify your realistic time available to write, identify your realistic productivity on a normal day, not your best day ever. Identify a goal. Write up the steps or milestones to reach said goal, break milestones into weekly chunks. Break the weekly chunks into individual tasks. The 12 week year recommends assigning points to the tasks so you can “grade” how the week went empirically. Then after each week, review your progress, your “grade”, and then adjust the remaining weeks, and continue on.
I think the most important thing I’m taking from this book is that it re-enforced Sarah’s suggestions that writers make better progress when we work in groups or communities to provide accountability and companionship while we work. I find that this is the one thing that is repeatedly recommended, that I have lacked for the last 20 years. The one time I did NaNoWriMo years ago, I did it in a discord group and I wrote a whole book in 30 days. So for the first time I’m going to really try to show up to a group activity and participate. Maybe I’ll make friends, maybe I’ll finish a book. At this point any progress towards publishing is good progress.
On that note I wrote today for one sprint with Tamara’s Thursday stream, and got 250 words written on Ivy’s story, so progress was made. I also made progress on the 12 week plan that I wrote out yesterday, and fine tuned it today with accountability charts in a bullet journal format. I’m going to start building the habits this week, and the group starts the following week.
I may try streaming my own writing sprints, I haven’t decided. Streaming is complicated.